Author's note:
A one-off this time. Apologies for the occasional technical jargon. CW for violence, drugging etc. But this is a noncon story, so you should be warned by the category. Enjoy:
It all came down to money, Alina Grachev thought as she looked at herself in the mirror in the women's bathroom underneath the convention floor.
Every time she had to talk at an event, Alina showed up early for the lavalier mic, then a quick, nervous dash for the nearest private place to catch a breath. But this time was different.
She knew it. Everyone in the auxiliary meeting room--now packed to standing room with researchers, engineers, industry footsoldiers, hacks and code evangelists--knew it. Because she'd looked over the financial documents and called the contracted customers of FORGEX over the last weeks and found they could not possibly have made $417 million in revenue from Large Language Model adoption FORGEX CEO Lawrence Reynolds claimed in the last quarter.
Fraud, in essence, was what she would describe before all those people.
But Alina was not a computer scientist. She was barely an economist. It still baffled her, sometimes, her path from the history department journal through the Institute for Historical Political Economy to Petroleum Profit Analysis & Research Group and now, at last, to an analyst's desk for Shockley, Shockley and Berkowitz.
Three months out from 26 and she was the youngest associate analyst at the firm since the Truman administration and the only one without an Ivy degree.
She'd rewatched
Michael Clayton
the night before, alone in her modest suite on the 13th story (14th floor, per the elevator) of the conference hotel, because it stoked the depressive euphoria that follows the discovery of unmitigated evil. In the days after she'd concluded FORGEX was lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission, she'd walked around her fourth floor walk-up muttering bible passages and stanzas of Eliot to herself while the winter light outside faded.
She checked her watch, set a habitual four minutes fast, brushed a loose hair back behind her ear and turned for the door.
Alina switched the lav mic on as she entered the dark hall. Up on stage, Lawrence Reynolds sat on his barstool, his custom-designed Allbirds pumping up and down on the lowest rung.
"There she is," Lawrence said. "The naysaying bean counter herself."
"Be nice, Lawrence!" the moderator, a stout fifty-something, said.
As she approached the stage, Alina could feel the eyes on her, a hundred eyes, a thousand eyes, all this money! All these people!
Up the risers, one-two-three, then left into the light. She paused, stared into the halo from the rafters and the silent dark beyond. A few muffled noises reached her: the rustle of fabric as a man uncrossed his legs, the scratch of a notetaker's pen, a faint sigh of anticipation. Intimate sounds. Close sounds.
She didn't remember the first minutes of the panel, just the impression. Sparring, nervous laughter. She underplayed her findings, the sweat starting under her white blouse as she fought to avoid Lawrence's eyes.
"That is a non-GAAP measure, Mr. Reynolds," she said. "Now, I know California culture encourages a certain laxity in accounting practices but--"
"Of course you'd say that!" He said. "Because you New Yorkers don't understand that technology is built on dreams. And you have to burn money to get it running. That's what that measure is: Our commitment to the dream. The dream of an Artificial General Intelligence that can do everything: Build a marketing campaign, make a movie, be your personal servant. At FORGEX we're forging the future, and we're doing it cheaper than our competitors."
"Really what you're doing is counting $280 million in credits for the use of subsidiary data centers owned by your Web Service Provider as revenue," she said. "And as an investment. You've double-counted, really triple-counted, since it's a discount not--"
She could feel the blood creeping up her neck, the blush, when he interjected.
"Of course it's revenue!" He said.
"Please, let's talk revenue," she said and leaned forward. "Because when we look at the statistics for your consumer-facing products, rather than the enterprise suite, we see 37% of registered users have a.edu email address and 34% are paying with a parent's credit card. Which means your user base is high schoolers and college students. You've built a plagiarism machine, Lawrence, not AGI. And that sector doesn't even turn a profit!"
"Of course it doesn't turn a profit!" He said. "Startups don't turn profits. You'd know that if you had more than a bachelor's in, what was it?" He snapped his fingers at the moderator.
"Russian History and English Comparative Literature are Ms. Grachev's specialties," the moderator said. "But this panel discussion is supposed to be about AI use cases for publicly traded growth firms."
A general roll of laughter. Cold anger spread in her chest.
"If I could catch you," she said. "You're not as good as you think."
"Catch? That's the SEC's job. They haven't come knocking, why? Because Innovation. They know what we do is vital to the--"
"Ability of your Web Service Provider to count an unprofitable division as profitable and get a nice bump after their earnings call," she said.
A murmur in the audience, scratching pens. She closed her eyes. Those would be the reporters, the other analysts. The bloodhounds.
"--National security of the United States," Lawrence finished.
But the wind had gone from him a bit. Alina opened her eyes, fixed him with them. He was a strong man, a year or two shy of forty, thick in the shoulder and hip, but he wasn't tall. If he'd worn insoles he might've reached her height, 5 feet 11 inches. Her height had been the first thing about her to draw unwanted gazes.
Once Lawrence Reynolds had been handsome, but his face had long ago lost any semblance of humanity and become a blank, manipulated mask. No sweat, no pores, no age lines: a plain of unchanging skin, an impermeable barrier between self and world. For a second, as he flashed a grin at her across the stage, she thought the spread of his smile might never stop and the corners of his mouth would run round the back of his skull and meet there like the rupture line on an overripe fruit and his brains and teeth and palate would come tumbling out onto the stage.
"But I don't expect you to care about that," he said. "All you Gen Z know is negativity. You're so risk averse because you've been coddled your whole lives. Thorium Enterprises, you know, now they're risk takes. They signed a contract with us. You know, when I was your age I was--"
Credibly accused of rape, she thought. A source in FORGEX had sent her that memo from the general counsel. But she gulped, fidgeted. She couldn't say that, it might endanger whoever had sent her that email. She could still see the subject line, with its little bit of Joyce's Dubliners:
FORGEX:
That region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.
And all that had nothing to do with shareholder value, with the run rate of data centers or the wastewater generated by the cooling apparatuses for all that compute power in the Mojave desert.
She spoke without hearing what Lawrence was saying, some minor anecdote about bootstrapping his way up after the recessions. No mention of the trust fund.
"See, I called Thorium," she said. "I won't burn my person there, but I called them. They said that they were buying it because the C-suite wanted to be able to say their people knew how to use an LLM if the clients called. That's not a use case."
